


little wings of white flame

by millcrs (remoose)



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Post-Season/Series 03, Traumatic Brain Injury, Unreliable Narrator, erica is chef's kiss, everybody gets checked out, nancy deals with some things, so many concussions, starcourt aftermath, steve's emotions are muted
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:14:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23149846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remoose/pseuds/millcrs
Summary: He waits on the floor of Starcourt with Max. Beneath the lights that spun above himself and Robin only a few hours prior. That made them throw up the Russian acid and theirfeelings.He brushes her hair back from her face and tells her to breathe with him, even if his breathing is a little fucked from what are most likely some cracked ribs, even if he can’t really hear it but doesn’t want to dwell onwhy. And she cries nonsensical things, about what she couldn't do. Her cheek looks a little swollen, like his did after a slap from Nancy, but it's her eyes that scream like blank ruin, like maybe she won't ever move on from this, and there's nothing much Steve will ever be able to do about it.
Relationships: Eleven | Jane Hopper & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Steve Harrington & Erica Sinclair, Steve Harrington & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Steve Harrington & Nancy Wheeler
Comments: 54
Kudos: 180





	1. percolate the mind

**Author's Note:**

> this is just a little post-starcourt fic that i decided to throw out there. it probably won't be more than three chapters, and will allude to [my other post season three fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22932169), but it's not necessary that you read. i hope you like it! and pls let me know what you think if you have the time c:
> 
> title from "every single night" by fiona apple

Steve accounts for all the kids once the doors of the mall let out. He takes the escalator steps two at a time and separates Max from the bloodied body of her brother, so the Doc can clean things up. So they can all find some peace. 

His face throbs, eye splitting as though it might fall out of the socket, but Max clings, tearing softly at his uniform, at his skin, with fingernails bitten raw. 

Distantly, he is aware of El sat behind them. Frozen. Her leg still shredded from when Jonathan poked around with a knife like he knew what he was doing. He wants to reach for her too, but maybe Wheeler should do that. Maybe Hopper should be the one to pick her up and heal her head of all the horrors she saw in Billy. In what he'd done. 

His arms are full with Max, anyway. She keeps pulling, as if she can stop the black blood leaking from all the vital points of Billy's chest. He wants to keep her together like he couldn't with Billy. 

Like none of them could. 

The sweaty wisps of her hair irritate the burning itch of his nose. She's crying, hysterically, and all breaths leave her in heaves so huge that Steve wonders if the pressure might crack her ribcage. Billy wasn't her best friend or anything, but he was something, and Steve remembered something from a book Nancy liked about thin lines between love and hate. So maybe this really was ripping her apart. Maybe it already had. 

"Red. Hey, Red." He whispers against her forehead, arms wrapped around her as they shake on the floor. As the Doc and his crew pick up the pieces around them and zip Billy's body into a plastic bag. 

Steve can't look at that, so he turns Max's face with his bloodied hands so she doesn't have to look at it either. 

He tries to smile despite the situation in that way Nancy always hated, all bullshit and fake everything to make this, this _moment_ feel even _somewhat_ okay. But none of it is okay, and Steve's never really been the leader of their greater party; of the kids plus Hopper, Ms Byers, Nancy, and Jonathan. If he could spy that tacky Hawaiin shirt that looked like something Tommy H. wore to Carol's themed birthday party in sophomore year, then Steve would know what to do. With Max. With Billy's body being _right there_ , being dead. With El and her leg and Erica being, like, _way_ younger than any of them were when this whole shit show started back in '83. 

So he waits on the floor of Starcourt with Max. Beneath the lights that spun above himself and Robin only a few hours prior. That made them throw up the Russian acid and their _feelings._

He brushes her hair back from her face and tells her to breathe with him, even if his breathing is a little fucked from what are most likely some cracked ribs, even if he can’t really hear it but doesn’t want to dwell on _why_. And she cries nonsensical things, about what she couldn't do. Her cheek looks a little swollen, like his did after a slap from Nancy, but it's her eyes that scream like blank ruin, like maybe she won't ever move on from this, and there's nothing much Steve will ever be able to do about it

...

Some army guys went to Weathertop to get Dustin and Erica. When they get back to the mall, the towering inferno that it now, somehow, is, Lucas makes a beeline for his sister. He crushes her against his chest, _My Little Pony_ backpack and all. 

Steve thinks maybe he didn’t know what to do with his hands before; with Max. He thinks that none of them really know what to do, because they’re pretty much all kids. Even Nancy and Jonathan and Robin. 

Steve is the only adult around at present. Which is pretty hilarious, when you think of how little faith each of them have invested into him as a responsible, rational person. 

So, for a moment, a sliver of a second, he begins to feel a little hysterical. When Max writhes in his arms while simultaneously clinging to his blood soaked uniform. When Dustin runs straight for him to ask a million and one questions that Steve just can’t _fathom_ , let alone _answer_. 

Fortunately, Robin swoops in. She removes Dustin from this frantic equation for as long as she can muster. She doesn’t really know Max, or anyone here beside Steve, Dustin, and Erica, so he can’t blame her. 

Of course, Max notices none of this. Knows nothing of El’s clear wish to intervene, to help in some way, like she hasn’t already helped enough. But Wheeler’s got her held back, on the step of an ambulance, someone tending to her head wound. As it should be. It’s damage control -- to minimise Hopper’s inevitable freak out at the state of his kid once he emerges from the Russian elevator. 

Steve tries not to wonder why it’s taking him so long. 

That worry is halted briefly by a gurney being pushed in his direction. Two military paramedics try to ease Max from his arms and onto the fitted sheet, but she grabs for him, for his stupid sailor uniform that begs to be changed. 

“Max -- Red, c’mon. You’ve _got_ to calm down.” 

And her sobs are hiccuping, like she can’t quite get a solid breath in and out. He doesn’t know how to help her, because his own chest is rattling like a jar of quarters now -- so loud that he can hear it in the only ear that seems to be _working_. The din surrounding them is so loud, so hushed at the same time, that he wonders if she can hear a word he’s saying. So he lets her lean into him once more, gently turns her swollen cheek to face the gloved paramedic who cleans it with something that’s definitely supposed to sting. 

Max doesn’t even blink. 

He holds her like that, whispering senseless things to the crown of her head, rubbing slow circles to the centre of her back. He holds her until almost everyone’s been triaged, until a crowd starts to gather at the barricades that have been built to block off the parking lot. 

He holds her until Ms Byers comes out, grips onto her youngest son like he’s a lifeline, and Hopper’s absence smacks Steve right in the depths of his chest. 

It’s so easy to feel how it causes Eleven to pause, to stagger. To stand in solitude despite a mauled leg and a probable concussion. To stand like that, despite how life keeps trying to knock her down. 

And it’s only then that Max seems to wake. She extracts herself from Steve’s hold and lands on her feet, steadily. 

One of her braids has fallen out and her face has a tiny square of gauze on it, but she catches El against her chest as though she’s a foot taller than the girl before her. Like she’s doing what Steve just did for her, only with more strength and efficiency. 

In the grazed and aching palms of his hands, Steve squeezes the edge of the gurney. Or tries to. His bones feel so soft, and he can’t focus at all on the motion of his muscles because his mind is far too distracted by the image before him. 

It’s not his place -- to swoop in. He’s pretty much taken permanent residence at the bottom of the list that entails the people that Eleven is closest with. She wouldn’t want it from him, no. She can always see right through him anyway. Like, how can he tell her that it’s okay when it’s undoubtedly not? When it feels a little like the world is tilting on its axis because Hopper is gone and the Russians killed him and _why didn’t Steve offer to go down there and help him?_

He tries to tell himself, hunched over the gurney while the medics flutter around him as if he’s not really there, that it’s because his gut instinct has always been to protect the _kids_. Because they’re still kids, and they’re his responsibility. And yeah, that’s partially true, but then he thinks of the soldiers and the bone saw and the doctor trying to rip his fingernail out of its bed and he has to squeeze his eyes up tight; even though they feel like they’re about to pop out of his skull. 

“ _Hey!_ Sailor man.”

Steve flinches at the voice, shoulders shrugged up in defense and hands up in a placating manner -- even though he can’t feel them and his chest is burning and he really doesn’t want to be around when Mrs Sinclair figures out his involvement in all of this. 

“Erica, I- ”

“Shut up.”

He does as she says, teeth clattering against his swollen bottom lip in his haste. 

“Lucas just told me that you went and _crashed_ the Toddfather into that creepy lifeguard and I just _have_ to ask,” She pauses for emphasis, probably. Because Erica knows that people listen to her, that she is usually the voice of reason. “Were you dropped on your head too much as an infant or were you just _born dumb_?”

Her comment smarts a little, especially coming from a toddler. In any other moment, Steve’s hands would have found themselves firmly on his hips -- his usual stance for lecturing the brats, for calling a play, for trying to seem like he knows exactly what he’s doing. But they now sit uselessly at his sides, forearms an abstract piece of art, entirely of Max’s making. His fingers just dangle, palms too heavy and hot for his wrists to hold up. 

The lights from the emergency vehicles and Starcourt and the cars that are pulling up to the perimetre are hard to look at; hard to even have in his periphery. But he tries to look at Erica, tries not to squint too much because, _shit_ , his eye really hurts. 

“Hey, _Sailor Man_ , you still in there?”

“Yeah, uh- I mean, why not both? My ma drank a _lot_ of sherry, y’know?”

“You can’t _drink_ cherries, Harrington. _Lord_ .” And he’d like to interrupt, to contradict her smart mouth -- because he’s not _that_ dumb and sherry is a _drink_ \-- but his mouth isn’t moving as fast as he needs it to, won’t catch up with what his mind wants to say. 

“Can someone please bring the Sailor man a blanket. I think he’s in shock. Hey, _you_!”

Steve flinches at her yelling before he’s able to witness her accost a random medic. The lights are so bright and he can still hear El crying and, _God_ , is July usually this cold?

Small hands with colourful beaded bracelets on their cuffs tuck the blanket around his shoulders and in under the collar of his vomit and blood soaked uniform. His eyes get stuck on them, the colours and their brightness, only for Erica to retract her hands once more, looking like she’s afraid he might bite them off.

“You don’t look so good…”

“I’m fine, Erica, really. I’m great. Look,” he points to a young woman wearing gloves, “you should let that medic lady check you out. Wouldn’t want to give your mom more reason to kill me after missing Uncle Jack’s party.”

And the girl must have an excellent sense of self-preservation -- coupled with Mrs Sinclair’s strict rules that have instilled the fear of God in her -- because she squints at him for another moment before walking over to the woman. Though he misses how her eyes latch onto Dustin like sharpshooters as if demanding that he fix this. 

Blanket wrapped around his shoulders and caught in a haze of _red blue red blue red blue red--_ Steve ambles towards the back of the ambulance in which Jonathan and Nancy are situated. Or were -- maybe he was moving a little too slow? -- because it’s just Nancy now, and her face is pinching up into that little pout that spells her not at all liking what she sees. 

“Owens is bringing all of us to the hospital.” 

She’s white as a sheet, hair matted to her neck in crisped ringlets, mascara smudged around her Bambi eyes. Steve wants to reach out and take her hand, but his own are now just refusing to even budge. 

“That’s good, right? Get all the kids checked out.”

“He’s setting up in the new ward, the one that-- well, you weren’t there.” 

Steve would like to tell her _I’m sorry_ , because he always preferred it before -- the first time -- when it was him, Nancy, and Jonathan fighting that thing together. The perfect balance of strengths and, inexplicably, trust. But he’s not all that sorry, seeing as the embarrassingly coined _Scoops Troop_ were a pretty good balance between themselves. And they really did need him. He knows they did, even if it doesn't feel like it right now.

But maybe Nancy and Jonathan had needed him too. Or at least _someone_. 

She bites her lip, hard, as if weighing up how best to tell him. Her eyes now lost to the scene of Ms Byers being comforted by her sons, El being eased to the ground by Max and Mike. 

“It got these guys -- my bosses at the Post. Flayed them like it flayed Billy. But--- well, I don’t know. They-- ” She steels herself, eyes still watery but voice entirely solid; immoveable. 

“They were _shit_ to me, Steve. So bad that I began to wonder if I even _wanted_ to be a journalist. And I know, I _know_ I can push too hard sometimes. But we got the truth in the end, right? It served us well. It’s just Tom and-- _God_ , Heather… and Janet too. I want to feel bad, to feel _guilty_ . Heather was a really sweet girl, but her dad? I felt so _relieved_ when he was gone. Even if he’d just melted into the monster that wanted to eat me.”

It’s a lot to dissect and process. A lot he doesn’t really wish to think about. Because Tom Holloway used to smoke cigars with his dad on their pool loungers. He kissed Heather on the upstairs landing while their moms spilled wine on the marble top counters and pretended to like each other. Heather was a sweet girl. _Was_. He wonders who else got taken. He can’t help but think of Tommy and Carol. Which only makes him think of Hopper and--

He crushes that thought before he can throw up all over the tarmac and sits himself next to Nancy on the back step of the ambulance. 

“No need to feel guilty about it, Nance.” She swims in his vision, a blurred mess of post-battle exhaustion. Steve thinks of nights spent in her room, trying to calm regrets and guilt of leaving Barb behind, of not being able to save her in time like they did Will. But he has to blink to focus her in time once more. 

“You had nothing to do with them getting flayed, right? They weren’t even chasing you because they didn’t like you, they were chasing you because _it_ didn’t like you. Because _it_ knew that you were onto something. And, I mean when you think about it, you being onto something saved a tonne more people in the end. Like maybe the whole town.” He tries for a smile, no doubt all bent and bloody and entirely unattractive. But she’s seen him in worse states. 

“And I think Heather would have preferred that, y’know? She was gonna wind up in med school anyway, so I guess she still got to save thousands of lives in the end.” He shrugs, tonguing the largest cut on his lip. “Just somethin’ to think about.”

She smiles then, a shattered but slowly mending thing that would allow words to escape. Steve can’t reach for her, to comfort, but he smiles back. This time really trying to tell her without telling her that _it’s okay_.

When the moment finally breaks, when another loud bang is heard as the mall caves in on itself, Nancy looks back to the chaos before them, to where everyone’s being loaded up into ambulances -- away from the prying eyes of the gathering crowds, no doubt. 

“We made a bit of a mess at the hospital. I guess Owens wants to kill two birds. He’s going to debrief us there, with NDAs, _blah blah_ …” A process they’re all familiar with by now, with the exception of their new additions (with the exemption of their leader). 

A medic ushers them further into the ambulance, up onto the cots that line its sides. Says that they’ll get a chance to look him over properly once they arrive at the temporary ward. _Sorry they couldn’t get to him sooner_ , so on and so forth. 

Steve doesn’t mind. He’d honestly rather not. He feels fine, but maybe he should ask them to check out his hands while they’re at it -- do some x-rays. Because they won’t do _anything_ now; it feels like everything below his wrist has vanished. 

But a head to his shoulder, pillowing against the gross lapels of his uniform, startles his body’s remaining senses into action. Somehow, despite the sweat and smoke, Nancy’s mango shampoo is the scent that absorbs him; sends his mind _back, back, back_ to times that felt _better_. 

“ _God_ .” She hisses against her blanket, pinching her nose with the soft material. “You _stink_ , Steve.”

“Well.” He drawls, lazy and fuzzy around the edges. The sounds around him still dull, despite him thinking the quiet of the ambulance would make it easier. “That’ll be the Russians, Nance. They’re a whole ‘nother monster.”


	2. these ideas of mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the aftermath of drugs and one of several concussions. steve regresses.

Doctor Owens sounds like a TV doctor -- all anecdotes and quips, grinning despite the situation and acting like everyone’s his buddy. 

Steve tries to focus on that. Focuses on how TV doctors are usually good as gold, not like Russian doctors who carry bone saws in their kit bags and dress like the villains in those comic books Lucas lent him. Doctor Owens talks with his hands. Steve wishes he could do it back. He watches the movements, keenly, focus fixated on how the bigger vowels earn an even wider spread of the doc’s hands. 

He fixates until one waves right before his eyes, under his nose, drawing his attention and causing his pupils to cross in the middle. 

Robins snorts with laughter, Steve snorts back. 

(He regrets it later for how the movement sends a sharp jolt up the bridge of his nose, but Robin is happy so Steve wants to be happy too). 

He has to concentrate real hard on her then, to figure out what she’s saying. Sits next to him on the bed so Steve can’t even look at her mouth, try and make out words from the movements. She even sits on the  _ wrong  _ side. God. 

He turns towards her, tucks his legs up on the bed criss-cross applesauce, as she tells the doc and everyone in their small surrounding ward who’s listening that the Russians split them up, so she doesn’t really know what happened to Steve at first, but for the most part they just left her alone. Well, apart from the slap. Which she says is no big deal. Steve wants to tell her that it  _ is _ .

Robin nudges at Steve, then, expecting him to take over, but he can only hum and twist at the grubby shoelaces of his Adidas. He raises a hand to cover his ear, uncover it, then cover it again. Confused and feeling as though he’s been padded on cotton wool, he finally speaks. 

“Why’d you stop talking, Rob?”   
  


“Well, uh…” She looks at him like he’s got something on his face. Or like he’s said something dumb. Most likely both, as both are true. “The drugs they gave us -- I don’t know how to describe that part.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He nudges at her shoulder, like _ it’s easy, Rob. Let me give you a hand with this. _ He turns to Owens, who’s standing above them with that quizzical TV look, like he’s going to say something funny so someone should really queue up the laugh track. 

Steve hopes they don’t laugh at him too. 

“It was like,  _ uh _ , acid. I think. You know what I mean? Felt like that for  _ sure _ .”

“ _ Acid _ .”

And Steve knows Owens isn’t actually asking him a question, but he nods vehemently anyway. 

“Yeah, like LSD. Or-- well I don’t know any other acid. Never had a trip like that before though,  _ whew _ .”

“ _ Steve _ .”

He snorts again --  _ ow  _ \-- because he thinks that might be Nancy. It’s hard to tell now. She’s a little too far away, sat over beside Jonathan like that. 

There's Jonathan, on the other side of the room, with his shirt cut open and laying flat on his stomach while another doctor examines him. 

Steve stares at his back then too, how all the notches poke out far more than he’s seen on anyone, except maybe the Party because they’re scrawny and still growing. But Jonathan’s back has lumps on it, all black and green and blues and Steve wonders how he threw all those fireworks back at the mall, how he even made it here in one piece. 

Even now, he’s still reaching for his mom, who is on the other cot, while Nancy runs her hands through his hair. Shushing him while she admonishes Steve -- a multitasker. Steve is stuck on that for a moment, on how nice it must feel, before his eyes fall back to Joyce. 

Joyce who has Will by her side and clearly doesn’t want to be laying down. Maybe she thinks she should be with El? But El is with Mike and Max, Steve made  _ sure  _ of that. And the doctor -- not Owens, no -- looks like he’s trying to reason with her. 

Did Joyce get injured? Is she upset over something? Steve can’t pick it apart in his head right now. It  _ hurts _ . And he wants to go up and hold her hand and let her squeeze when her head hurts too, but his hands are just  _ there _ , and there’s nothing  _ in  _ them anymore. Or there  _ is _ , but it’s just rattling around uselessly. 

Robin nudges him again, or again and again, and he turns to see Owens still looking at him. Expectantly, but not in any expectant way Steve has ever seen. 

“Do you remember the colour of the drug, Steve?”

“Green.” He blurts, entirely certain. Like he’s certain of Dustin’s green hat and the green beads on Erica’s bracelet. 

“No, Steve.  _ Blue _ . He  _ means  _ blue.” _Wrong_. Robin always thinks she's right -- _smarter_ than him -- has done since the beginning of summer.

“No, Rob. It was green. Remember? Erica was gonna drink it because  _ somebody  _ forgot to pack water.”

He feels his neck drop loose as he twists his head towards Dustin, who is all indignant and entirely red to the very tips of his ears.

“Yeah,  _ you _ . First the water and then the  _ batteries _ . Always with the damn  _ batteries _ , Henderson.”

“Well, I am  _ sorry  _ that I didn’t realise our mission to explore the source of that secret spy transmission would have us stuck in an  _ underground Russian bunker _ for over t _ wenty-four hours _ .”

The bed bounces then as Robin takes a leaf from the doc’s book, hands gesturing wildly as she tells them to shut up. Just  _ shut up _ . And he doesn't want to, because these questions are stupid anyway. Particularly when Ms Byers got thrown around by the Russian Terminator and El just cut a bit of the Mind Flayer from her own leg. But Robin is looking at him with those tired eyes and he can't help but feel bad for having dragged her into this; for having to _deal_ with all of this after their conversation on the floor of the ladies' bathroom. 

“Erica was being dramatic and threatened to drink the green liquid in the Chinese food boxes, Steve. The containers they were using to fuel that giant machine. The stuff that burned a hole in the floor. _ Remember? _ ”

He nods, vaguely, eyes swinging around the room to absorb the expressions of everyone. Because they’re  _ all  _ watching, in one way or another. Even Max, who now has a level of awareness in her eyes that she didn’t previously possess. She’s looking right at Steve like she doesn’t quite understand what she’s seeing. Her hand clutches El’s, who looks like she’s in another world entirely. When he smiles at them, they don’t smile back. 

“Well,” Robin continues, “The green stuff isn’t what they injected into our necks. Or we’d be  _ dead _ , dingus. Burned from the inside out. You get that right?”

Which, if he were more alert, he’d give her a swift kick to the shin for. Because Hopper got incinerated by that big drill, right? The one the Russians were using to tear another gate into the Upside Down. But Robin is new to all this, she can’t be blamed. The others only seem to mind a little.

“Yeah, but… it melted my bones, Rob. I  _ really  _ think it was the green stuff.”

And he knows how it sounds -- like he’s crazy. Sometimes, it feels a little like he is. Like when he was younger and dad would get mad at him for making things up like mom always did. Said that Steve begged for attention so  _ desperately  _ that his mind would come up with anything at all to justify his need. 

But back then they were just dreams. Bad dreams where monsters left claw marks on the inside of his wardrobe, where mom and dad left and Steve followed them the whole way around the world but could never quite catch up. 

Now,  _ now  _ he knows that monsters are real and having a mom who attempts to drown any negative feeling in pills and blood and  _ Chateau Lafite _ isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a teenage boy.  He knows all about hell and monsters and little girls who hardly knew a life outside of a cold, grey room and the kind of torture Steve could barely withstand for a few hours of his life. 

(He doesn’t even know if you could call what the Russians did torture. Because, in all honesty, it wasn’t much different to what Billy had done to him the year prior. It feels a little like, drugs aside, Billy did a lot more damage.)

Steve knows that monsters are  _ real,  _ little girls have superpowers, and the Russians invaded Hawkins, and he knows these things are real in exactly the same way that he knows there are no bones in his hands and he hasn’t been able to hear out of his left ear since Lucas’ fireworks. 

These things are real, but Robin still looks at him like he’s got a screw loose. She’s probably right, that would explain a lot. 

“There is  _ no way  _ you’re  _ still  _ high, dingus.”

She’s right -- it’s a little unlikely. But, then again, he can’t exactly pinpoint how long it’s been since the evil doctor injected them with that stuff. The  _ blue  _ stuff, he reminds himself. He does his best not to shiver at the thoughts of it.

There is a finger on his jaw then, tilting his chin up, as Owens shines a tiny light in his eyes and Steve blinks back from the stark white of it. His eye hurts, feels like it's about to pop out of his skull and roll around on the squeaky floor. Shouldn't Owens _know_ that?

“Well, how can we be certain?” That’s Dustin, he thinks, who must be standing pretty close. “We have no idea what the drug was, let alone what concentration of it they gave you. How was it administered? Orally?”

Steve snorts again, Robin whacks his shoulder. 

“Right in the neck.” She explains, squeezing Steve’s knee like she can remember the pain of it. “With this big ass syringe. I think it was meant to be a truth serum? I don’t know.”

“Yeah, Dustin man, I totally wouldn’t have said your name otherwise.” The worry gnaws at him, now that he can remember what he said -- Dustin’s full name, he even said  _ Hopper _ .  _ God _ , is that why he--

“Probably doesn’t matter now, I mean, do you think that guy, well… that he, you know?”

“ _ Oh _ .” Because, yeah, Dustin essentially electrocuted the doctor who had been threatening to yank Steve’s fingernails off. And yes, between them all, many a dodgy scientist had been killed, but Dustin put a lot of stock in his morals and his honour and, well, what kid would be totally okay with frying a man to death?

“Buddy, listen.” He edges out of Owens’ grasp, feeling a little drunk in how he’s standing up and trying to make his way across the squeaky floor to where Dustin is sitting. Steve has to stop halfway, stood in the middle of the makeshift ward and apparently now unmoving in his stance. He hopes they see it as strength, as conviction, and not an inability to move his legs any further. 

“You did what you had to do, right? I mean we all kind of fucked--  _ shit _ , sorry Ms Byers -- messed up down there--”

“Speak for  _ yourself _ , Harrington.”

“ _ Jeez _ , chill  _ out _ , Erica.  _ Anyways _ \--”

“Dingus, come sit back down.”

“Anyways, before I was so  _ rudely  _ interrupted, that creepy commie doctor was gonna rip us apart like the goddamn  _ Spanish Inquisition _ . And you, Henderson, my  _ man _ , you saved us. He’s gone now, we owe you one.”

“He  _ has  _ to be high.” Lucas speaks to the others like he’s not there, and Steve would throw him a  _ look  _ if he could coordinate his body to manage a turn of ninety degrees. “There is no way  _ Steve  _ would reference the Spanish Inquisition.”

“ _ Hey-- _ ”

“How are you feeling, Robin?” Dustin crosses the room -- which just  _ sucks _ , by the way, because Steve is still stuck in the middle of the room after trying to get to  _ him  _ \-- to place the back of his palm to her forehead, which she swats away like a pesky fly. 

“I feel fine.” Her tone is light, like her body is surprising her. “My neck hurts a little because  _ Speed Racer _ over here crashed the Toddfather. Whiplash, I guess?”

“Dehydration too, all four of you.” The doc chimes in, gesturing something vague towards the nurses that they seem to grasp without question. 

“So, if Robin feels fine…” Will begins, from where he still has a firm grip on his mom’s hand. 

“And Steve is standing there like he’s floating above his own body…” Dustin supplies, clearly pondering the situation thoroughly. 

“Wait.” And there’s Mike. Steve actually forgot that Wheeler was there for a second, feels his dreams crushed as the boy who’s supposed to be looking after El, who’s looking after Max, who’s also looking after El, just has to butt in with some smart ass comment. “Are you saying that  _ Keg  _ King Steve Harrington is a  _ lightweight _ ?”

And how he smiles at that, how the other kids somehow find it in themselves to laugh at his expense, would usually have El laughing too. But it’s like she’s not even listening, let alone present in the room with all the people who’ve somehow become her sort of family. Steve hopes he remembers to explain all that to Robin later. 

“Shut your mouth, Wheeler.” Steve snaps, though it’s half-hearted at best.

“What’re you gonna do, Steve?  _ Crawl  _ over here and  _ fight  _ me?”

“ _ Hey _ , Steve fought a Russian down in that bunker and he  _ won! _ ” Dustin defends like it’s some sort of triumph, like said Russian didn’t get back up and sound the alarm less than five minutes later. 

But maybe Mike is right. Steve just needs to sit down for a second. Albeit, the middle of the floor isn’t the best place to do that. It’s gross and he’s definitely in the way, and Dustin is tugging at him like he’s an embarrassed mother at the grocery store.

Tells him,  _ you can’t sleep here, buddy. _

_ C’mon let’s get you back in bed. _

Tells him, _ let’s get you hooked up too, huh? Nice and easy. _

And he sees it then, as he looks around the room. Where Lucas is having a wordless argument with his sister, where he stands by her bed as she pokes at something in her arm. Something that, when he casts his eyes around again, Joyce has in her arm too. That pole beside El with the little baggie swinging from the top, that  _ has  _ to be the same, right? And when he looks at Robin,  _ Robin  _ has… well.

He jolts then, in Dustin’s grasp. Hands falling hard onto his curly head because Steve just can’t keep them up. His green cap falling to the floor as Steve propels himself forward, latching onto Robin where she’s sat on her bed and ripping the needle out of her arm before he can even think about what he’s doing. 

All hell breaks loose. Robin yelling at him like she used to when he forgot to fill up the ever dwindling Cherry Garcia. Erica too, though she remains sitting on the bed and lets Lucas be the one to try and stop him, along with Dustin, on his journey across the room towards El.

El, who he should have checked on at the mall, and in the ambulance, and  _ here _ . He shouldn’t have just left it up to Max when he was supposed to be the babysitter. He had promised Hopper, before all this, when she had just been christened _ Jane Hopper  _ and the Chief didn’t want her feeling so alone and trapped out there in his cabin. Her new home. 

And Steve would laugh about it under normal circumstances, how Mike flinches back like Steve really is about to fight him for his comments, but  _ shit,  _ he should have checked on her. He should have stuck to Max like glue and brought them both to the hospital himself. He’s supposed to keep them  _ safe _ . 

He promised. Nancy, Joyce, Hopper. He promised the Chief and the Chief is  _ dead _ . 

The Chief is dead and these men are poisoning them and only Steve knows because he’s not a kid like the others, and Ms Byers and that bald dude weren’t down in the bunker long enough to know a Russian when they see one. 

He lunges for El and Mike jumps in front of her like Steve is a threat. Like any version of Steve in any of the infinite universes Dustin always talks about would ever harm a curly hair on Eleven’s head. Now that,  _ that’s  _ crazy. 

And though it’s Dustin and Lucas and Robin and some of the medics behind him, trying to tug him back and onto the bed because they just don’t understand, it’s Max who stops him. She blocks his path, shoulders squared and ready for impact. But it’s her hands that are soft, when she touches his cheeks, makes him look her right in the eyes and says:

“ _ Steve _ .”

He must have doubled over slightly, because the world feels a little bigger from where he’s standing, with all these hands descended upon him, tugging him back to the bunker. To the tunnels. To his pool.

He careens to the side but Max holds him tight, his face tucked between her hands like the blood and puss aren’t making them all sticky. She does to him what he did to her and Steve aches for the fact that this should be the other way around. 

She’s saying something, and he doesn’t know what. The world around him is underwater and Steve is drowning in it. There are hands all over him now, easing him  _ back, back, back _ onto the bed and he hopes that maybe some of them might be his own because he can’t _find them_.

When his eyes land on Robin, he can see a drop of blood on her arm, where the syringe -- the IV, he knows rationally -- would usually be. 

Deep down, he is in no way paranoid enough to believe that this man, this Doctor Owens, that Hop and Joyce seemingly trust would ever inject them with a drug similar to that of the Russians. But maybe the Party are right -- maybe Steve is a little bit of a lightweight.

Or maybe he’s been knocked on the head one too many times and the Russians knocked a screw loose.

Maybe that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one is a mess, i'm aware. my only explanation for it being that steve was too much of a mess for me to write in a consistent way. obvs he was showing signs of instability due to ??? in the last chapter and now this one too, ig the needle is just the thing that gets the most, uh... visceral reaction from him. the most sudden. this chapter was mostly just owens trying to suss out the russians, because they fled so fast and are therefore the most immediate threat. discussions about the other wise of things will come into play in the next chapter. 
> 
> as always, thank you so much for reading!!


	3. swarm the belly, swelling to a blaze

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was originally going to be one big thing, but it got too long so i split it up. also nothing in relation to steve’s hand is real, he just vehemently believes that one or both are missing. blame _girl, interrupted_ or my own personal experiences, but i just thought i’d let you know!

A million pairs of hands grab for him at once, in a mass of off-white and hospital green. Carol would call it turquoise, or some variation of aqua, but everything sensory seems to have reverted to its default setting. Robin’s hair is yellow, Max’s hair is orange. Doctor Owens has a mound of cotton candy on top of his head. 

Steve’s hands are _red_. 

The sharp simplification of all this colour and chaos around him, easing and urging him down onto the bed, makes everything that bit more clear. The pointed silver of a long needle, passing across solid blocks of colour in his line of sight -- green scrubs, blue scrubs, white sheets, creamy gloves, and finally, the royal blue of Steve’s stained sailor shorts. 

It’s only then that he wakes, from the dream state of compliance, of ease and trust and willingness to let these _random_ people in medical clothing poke and prod at him like he’s their dolly. 

But his limbs are loose and long, thrashing out and into the pair of medics who are brandishing the needle. He wriggles his way further down and into the rubber mattress, doing his best to escape the grasp of the million hands tempting to pry him apart. 

If he could hear anything beyond the incessant ringing in his ears, Steve would realise that he’s yelling. That a nurse is groaning because he caught her in the stomach with his foot. That the kids are asking questions and Robin is shouting answers that she doesn’t have. 

But all he can focus on at this moment in time is Max. The look in her eyes a wild one, of uncertainty and panic, like Steve is rolling in the back of the Camaro and Max is at the wheel. Lucas urging that she _turn here, quickly._ That she _get away from him, Max. Let the nurses handle it._ She is stubborn, though. Always has been unmoving in that way, a way that causes Steve to shoot up in the cot and grab her hands, like he can tell her the truth of this. Like he can make her understand. Like she might fight tooth and nail for his side because when has he ever let her down?

“I didn’t mean to do it, Red, I _swear._ ” He whispers fast, urgently. “He was gonna rip my nails off-- and a bone saw, he had one of those. I think he did something to my hands, really, don’t know where they are.”

“Steve, you’re not making any sense.”

Her voice is slow, emphatic, like she’s being extra careful to make sure he’s really grasping what she’s about to say. And for a moment, she has him. He’s all convinced in the very base of his mind that Max is right, this is ridiculous and _so_ crazy. She’s looking right at him with big, bright, Malibu eyes and he’d be hook, line, and sinker for his quasi little sister if not for the sharp prick delivered to the crease at his right elbow. Right where he knows it’s tricky to find a vein, right where the blood flow is super close to his heart. 

He flinches, almost tipping sideways off the side of the cot and onto the floor, only to be caught by gloved hands, all rubbery and pinching at his skin. 

Steve knows Nancy is there, close to him, purely by the smell of her perfume. _Charlie,_ all stifling and a little suffocating. Made him sneeze when he’d sleep over in her bedroom on school nights. He’d tried to buy her nicer stuff, softer, like _Miss Dior,_ but Nance liked to scold him with that look of hers and say it was too expensive. She’d throw a fit if she saw how much he spent on his mom’s _Chanel No.19._

Much like she is now, in his periphery, insisting that he calm down and attempting to shake his hold of Max’s hands. His grip isn’t tight, no, but he does give the bones of her knuckles a slight squeeze at the sight of the long, plastic tube that travels all the way from his arm, up to a clear baggie that a nurse is fixing to a metal pole. 

“I don’t want that, no. I don’t _want_ it, Nance.” And though his left eye is prone in its swollen and bloody state, his right one widens like it can’t quite believe what they’ve done. He saw it coming, the needle, and didn’t think to intercept, not in enough time anyway. 

“None of us want it, Steve. But who knows how long you were down there without food or water-- ” Dustin raises a finger to interject, because he knows exactly how long, but Nancy silences him with an abrupt glare. “What _happened_ down there? You were totally fine in the ambulance.”

Steve doesn’t dare reflect on that. How, sure, he received a few blows to the head and the chest and they _wanted_ to rip his fingernails off but they _didn’t._ Even worse to think that they did something awful to his hands, that they hit Robin. That one of those Russians, maybe the ones Steve was with --- he could have _stopped_ them --- killed Hopper. So -- indirectly, really, like what happened with Barb -- he is responsible for that too. Surely. 

_He_ should have been the one down there, fighting Russians -- because he can do that now -- not Hopper or that bald guy, and _certainly_ not Joyce, no way. Steve should have been brave and interrupted Hopper’s big plan to say _no, Chief. I’ll go down there. I met these guys, I know the lay of the land._

But Steve was scared and stupid and now he’s holding the hands of a fourteen year old and trying not to cry while his ex-girlfriend asks him questions that he can’t really answer in front of children. 

She’s right, though -- Nancy. In the ambulance he felt totally fine. Sure, Nancy filled him in some on the ride over, about their side of things. When his head felt a little heavy to keep up, and he missed some of the things she said because her mouth was moving but no sound was coming out. He couldn’t quite figure out why, and only asked her to speak up once before accepting that nothing made much of a difference. 

But it wasn’t like this. He wasn’t so scared of the hospital and the Russians and something blue and sinister bleeding its way into his veins, not like he is now. Perhaps that was naive of him. Or maybe the Steve now is wrong and _sick._ Maybe he puked up the drug with Robin and they both felt fine, but it did something to Steve and he’s stuck like this forever. 

Visions hit him then, like they’re in the room with him, of seeing his mother off at Thanksgiving in ‘78. Her spindly legs tucked up into a wheelchair, purse clutched tight in her lap, while a woman in white carts her down the never ending corridor. 

_Oh, honey,_ she’d said, mascara pooling in the high rise of her cheekbones, _three blinks and I’ll be back home. In time for Christmas too!_

She wasn’t back until the end of January, and that Christmas was the last one his father joyfully spent with him. He begs not to shake apart like she did, and does his best not to think about feeling this way for the rest of his life. 

Still he blinks once, then twice, a third time and his mother is gone. Steve knows, inherently, that if he were to call now, she wouldn’t come. But everyone that he sees before his eyes, pressing him in the ward, is real. They’re all here and they’re all together and Nancy has taken one of his hands from Max, is holding it for the first time in almost a year. He wishes he could feel it, but all Steve can do is squeeze and hope, despite the unfeeling, that she is squeezing back. 

His breath, coming out in a wheeze, informs Nancy that he doesn’t know. Steve would like for them to all really think about this, for Dustin to use his famed logic and for Erica to counter it with something equally logical. For Mike to intervene with a sniping comment and for them all to come to this grand solution and save the day; make everything be as it should. 

“Steve, stop that.” It can’t be him, tugging at the needle embedded in his skin. But it’s his own hands that he sees doing it. Max has been called back by someone, by Joyce maybe or Eleven. He’d like for her to come back but doesn’t think it’s fair of him to ask. Not after what happened to her brother. 

“ _Steve._ ”

“I don’t _want it,_ Nance. I told you that and you won’t listen.” He implores, chest tight in his mess of a uniform. He’d like it all off, his own clothes, his own bed, nothing in his veins and Nancy back where she belongs: with Jonathan. 

“Everyone has to have one, Steve, okay? It’s been a long few days. See, even Dustin has an IV. To help him feel better.”

And in all of that, it hadn’t occurred to him that, physically, Dustin may have been harmed. He knows Nancy wants to appeal to his favour of Dustin but all her information does is get Steve all worried again over the kids and how he needs to check on each of them and how he can’t do that with a needle poking out of his elbow. 

It’s yanked out, by hands that look like his own, and he flails clumsily to swing himself off the bed. Again. Blood pools in the crook of his elbow like it did Robin’s and blots like crimson ink onto the white, starchy bedsheets. He reaches for Dustin, who is a few feet to the right, and Dustin reaches back, but Steve is intercepted once more by hands and this time he doesn’t have it in him to be so compliant. 

He lurches and kicks at the million hands, the scrape of a syringe leaving a shallow laceration on his forearm. There’s talks of sedation flooding into the cavern of his right ear, where everything rings clear as a bell and he can hear how the nurses rally around Owens for some form of direction. 

Steve sees the other doctors in the background, willing them to stay in place, to focus on Joyce and Jonathan and leave him be so he can attend to the kids like he’s _supposed_ to. There’s a harsh _No_ from Owens. To what, Steve doesn’t know. But he looks up, while grappling with the attendants, limbs flooded with sheer panic and _need_ to just check and make _sure_ and be certain that things are okay. The ringing in his ears heightens the level of urgency to almost unbearable levels. 

Why is he the only one who’s freaking out?

What he sees are more pairs of eyes than he can count, staring with varying levels of shock, worry, confusion maybe. He can see Joyce rise in her cot, attempting to make her way over before being stopped by the bald guy. Their exchange is quiet, brief, and leaves Joyce with such a look of upset that Steve bucks up in bed against the hold of the medical staff trying to pin him down. 

His head spins as they fix him to the bed with their gloved hands. He squirms and writhes and _kicks_ and Nancy is back again, yelling at him like she did that time behind the Hawk. When Jonathan was the one winning the fight. Similarly, all of these medics are winning their fight against him and he's still the one she calls on to stop.

Like, _no, Nance._ Maybe _they_ should stop. Trying to hurt him and Robin and pull his fingers out of their sockets like he even has use for them anymore. Making his chest fracture into two solid pieces, his throat raw from screaming, his face bursting like a fourth of July firework.

He sneers at her, not realising that it will be lost in the chaos, therefore looking needlessly petty. She's the one who caused this problem. The one who always claimed Dustin was her favourite and still let Owens and his assistants stick the kid with a needle. 

“Fuck you, Nance!” She hurries to quiet him. Around them, a curtain is pulled and she is being ushered out, by the grabby nurses. Steve wishes she’d just go. Wishes that he could see Robin, make sure they’re not hurting her again too. 

“Steve, you need to calm down. You’re scaring the kids.”

“They _should_ be scared. You have _no idea_ what they’re going to do to us, Nance.” His voice cracks when it rises in volume, breaks the sound barrier and causes a tonal shift in the ringing of his ear. The curtain does very little to block the sound to the outside. 

Steve can’t help the panic that builds in the cage of his chest and crushes him from the inside out. The need to suck one full breath of air in is burning, he doesn’t know _how._ Everything is rattled and off kilter and none of this can be right because who is there to trust when alternate universes bleed black into their reality and Russians have been living under their town for over a _month?_

“I know, okay? None of you get it. And it’s going to be our fault, because we let it happen. Like with _Barb_ , and… and _Billy_.” 

An attempt at breaking his skin again, he swipes his arm from the reach of tiny, gloved hands. A slight nurse who should not be able to contain the arc of his limb but manages quite readily with a vice like grip on his wrist. 

“ _How…_ this isn’t even the same thing. The Gate is closed. Ms Byers _closed_ it.”

“You don’t know these Russians, Nancy, you have no idea what they’re doing. They’re smart and they’ve been building things. They built a whole evil lair a mile below the mall and they could do it again if they really wanted to. And they _do!_ ” His right leg snaps to the hard rubber of the mattress like a magnet. It hurts, but he kicks up again anyway, some thick material -- leather maybe, biting raw into the skin right above his tube socks. They took his Adidas, he doesn't quite know _when._

“ _Steve,_ just-- ”

“I really don’t see how this is productive, Wheeler.”

And it’s Robin who pushes through the curtain. Robin with her yellow hair and bandaid on her arm and freckles on her face and her crush on Tammy Thompson. He’s wired at the sight of her, filled with things like fear and relief -- because she always seems to know what to do -- all over again. He’s hit with a wave of it as his other leg is strapped down. It bites into his flesh, with how tight it’s fastened. 

In the frenzy of the moment, he thinks he may be crying. Not so much a whimper as a sob. Guttural stuff, that burns his chest and has him wheezing with the effort of pulling in even a single breath of air. Steve’s eyes feel hot with the tears that are running rivulets down the busted flesh of his face. It stings and he’d be so embarrassed by the hurt of it all if not for the paper thin curtains surrounding him and the white hot feeling of blind panic that surges through him with a mercy akin to that of the Russian general. 

It must be the stub of his one free wrist that reaches up to wipe at his face, to clean up the mess and the salty tears, but it hurts when he tugs at the lids of his eyes so maybe something is still there. Maybe there are bones beneath the useless flesh. 

Large hands pry and pull and hold his arms down, and Steve wonders if Doc Owens has been there the whole time. If he’s the one who told his masked staff to use restraints. Like he’s an animal, or a prisoner. 

“Now Steve, I think we’re looking at an orbital fracture at the very least, so it’s best that you don’t touch your eyes. Capiche?”

If it were Hopper here with him, trying to hold him down and calm him like he’s an infant who’s throwing a fit, Steve doesn’t think he’d cry. No. He’s a lot better than that, he thinks. This is just… well, he’s _tired,_ okay? He’s sick and tired of only getting to sleep if it means being knocked unconscious. He’d like a nap, at the very least, and he must stammer out the question to the Doc because the man shakes his head with a sorry, little _no._

He says, _can’t sleep with a concussion, son. I imagine you know that by now._

_But you dry your eyes, now. No more tears. Easy._

_I’ll leave this arm free if you promise not to touch. Do we have a deal?_

_You wanna hold your girl's hand? Keep yourself calm?_

And, if it were under other circumstances and the fear of God hadn’t planted itself in the forefront of his mind, Steve would laugh at how the Doc blatantly looks between Nancy and Robin like he can’t quite fathom who Steve’s _girl_ is.

“Rob.” He reaches out, unsure of whether it is his arm that is shaking or if everything is just blurry now. And she takes it, even though he’s pretty sure she hated him before all this. Back when it was just the two of them, constantly on the same shift at Scoops because the manager had said they looked good together. 

She squeezes and Steve can feel it. He’s so absorbed by this sensation that he doesn’t notice Doctor Owens again, sliding up to him on one of those wheely stools. Clipboard to the side, gloves on. 

Without really meaning to, Steve shrugs away, as far as the restraints allow him. He eyes the surrounding nurses who are awaiting instruction with blatant distrust, with the thought that they could, at any moment, produce some of the polished and deadly looking tools that the Russians seemed to make great use of. 

“Would you like them to leave, son?”

_Son,_ he doesn’t like that. But he doesn’t like any of this at all. So he nods. He’d like to tell the Doc, in this privacy, how much he dislikes the entire situation but he’s trembling now, with such a ferocity, that Robin presses the back of her ice cold hand to his forehead; like that one time he had a really bad flu and Mrs Wheeler was the only one to notice. 

He wonders if she’s trying her hardest not to shake apart too. 

It’s the physical examination that has him stirring again, wriggling around in the grasp of the restraints _and_ Robin as Owens pokes and prods at him. 

A promise of no more needles for now, but a whole host of other devices that encroach upon his ear canal and light up his eyeball like a disco. He wretches all over his cursed uniform -- again -- and Robin sighs with such a level of exasperation that Steve can imagine she’d rather be anywhere else. 

_Nashville._ He snorts.

But she’s still got a death grip on his hand. 

“So.” The Doc swings around, fingers folded together as if to stop himself from being too expressive. “Bones like marbles in a sock, huh, Steve? Or a _glove,_ I reckon.”

“Uh huh. They knocked me out, Doc. It-- it must’ve been then.”

A tilt of the head, a flex of his fingers like he’s _showing off,_ and Owens is considering it. 

“Well, Steve, if you’ve got no bones in your hand, how’d you pull Ms Buckley’s IV out, hm?”

A lift of the cotton candy eyebrows, queue up the laugh track, and the crowd goes wild for _Doctor Sam Owens._

  
Because, _really,_ what has Steve ever been but a big, dumb joke?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _charlie_ is a perfume by revlon that was really popular in the 80s. i only know this because i watched natalia’s SAG-aftra talk and she mentioned how she associates scents with the characters she plays, and how she was going to use the _charlie_ perfume for nancy, but it was so strong that she didn’t think it would be fair to joe, making out with her and only smelling that.
> 
> also thanks so much for all of your kind words on the last chapter. it means so much!


	4. butterflies in the brain

There’s blood on the floor where Steve ripped the IV out of Robin’s arm. It has everything and everyone else in the room existing in shades of grey.

When Mike thinks of all the potential eventualities of this night at the mall and all the factors and forces that were pushing against them, despite the vanishing of those forces, this still feels like it is the worst possible outcome.

Like maybe they’ve been riding too high on their third success. Characters in movies and comic books always suffer more loss than this -- more than the loss of 3.5 innocents (because he’s hard-pushed to consider _Billy Hargrove_ innocent, after seeing what he did in the fall of ‘84, but he was still a _person_ ). Perhaps whatever God or Gods that exists out there thought that this rag tag group of ill-prepared teens and their frazzled adult leaders hadn’t quite suffered enough. 

And sure, he’d had his fair share of run-ins with the Chief -- over things he now regrets and things he would never wish to take back -- but looking at El and how she’s slumped into the rubber mattress and static pillows of her hospital cot, Mike wishes for nothing at all but Hopper bulling through the plastic curtains, onto the makeshift ward, and threatening bloody murder unto him and his very existence for even being within three feet of Eleven. 

It’s not fair, really. None of it is. 

From the moment that they began their meager existences in Hawkins, Indiana, to when Will was snatched from them by a creature from a world they previously thought to be make-believe, to now, the odds have been stacked against them. And maybe it is no God or Gods or fate and its cruel workings. 

Maybe El’s torn up leg, Max’s dead step-brother, Jonathan’s busted back, Ms Byers’ busted head, and Mike’s own sister ducking out from behind the curtain blocking Steve from the rest of them like she’s just seen a _ghost_ is merely a demonstration of their individual roles in a very unfortunate series of coincidences. 

Mike would love to say that to El. That this life of her’s wasn’t meant to be so full to the brim of tragedy. That this pain and grief is all the result of pure chance. When she flinches at the undoubted sound of Steve ( _Steve!_ ) crying behind the redundant curtains, Mike thinks that he’d very much like to whisk her away from all of this and into a realm of existence where her father is not dead and her heroes are not reduced to panicked tears of remembrance at the sight of a needle. 

He knows, however, without a single ounce of doubt in his mind, that she’d refuse to budge. And it’s not like he wants to either. Though El’s bony hand is squeezing him, grounding him in the space of the room and stopping him from floating away into thoughts of _what if_ and _how come,_ Mike knows he’d want to stay.

Because Ms Byers is trying not to cry from her spot across the room, next to a battered Jonathan, and Will, who looks like his whole world has been turned upside down (ha!) all over again. 

Because Nancy looks fit for a tantrum when she emerges from Steve’s little corner, which Mike understands to mean that she is the kind of upset that she can’t convey with words. An unusual state of being for his sister, he tries to think, in the nicest way possible. 

And though people think them to be the kind of siblings who do not offer comfort, who relish in the contempt they’ve advertised to have for one another, it doesn’t stop Mike from approaching her before she can make her way back over to Jonathan.

“What happened?” he asks softly, beating Dustin to the punch. 

Nancy doesn’t speak for another moment, big doe eyes -- the shape of their mother’s -- wide and unblinking in some kind of disbelief. Mike gives her another second to gather herself before reaching, slowly, to brush the tips of his fingers against her forearm. An offer of his hand to hold hers; something they haven’t done since he was six and wasn’t permitted to cross the road without the help of his big sister. 

“It’s not like before. I’ve never seen him like that.”

She’s talking about last year when, for weeks, Steve was off kilter and out of sorts enough for Dustin to think that he’d gone back to his obnoxious jock self and had changed his mind about being in the Party. But the fact had been at the time that Steve’s head was all shook up from when how many hits Billy had landed on him (fourteen, including the plate, Mike had been counting). He wasn’t able to drive them anywhere for a long time. Had to bike it like the rest of them -- despite crashing once or twice -- or begrudgingly accept rides from the Chief or Jonathan, squashed in the back between Mike and Will while his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend rode up front. 

It had been awkward, to say the least. Even more awkward because none of them had known how to approach the situation. Mike knew from overhearing Nancy on the phone that Steve didn’t really have anyone at home, so his lie to the Chief about his mom being there to wake him up every half hour and ask him who the president was rang clear as day. 

So now, of course there is no one Mike can think to call to learn of any medical history that Steve might have; there is no way he can tease that look off Nancy’s face by obtaining knowledge over the situation. He’s certain Dustin would have already done so if it were possible. 

“Hurt?”

That was El, the first word she’d spoken all night since hearing of Hopper. Well, _seeing_ \-- the matter hadn’t truly been spoken of yet. Mike celebrated this tiny victory inside his head, careful not to appear too pleased lest it make her shy away.

“Yes.” Nancy explains, gaze faraway but voice suddenly steady and grounded. She takes another moment before looking, then, to them all. 

“It’s probably the drug. They can flush it out of his system properly here. Safely.” She wilts, words leaving her lips slowly like she doesn’t quite believe them herself. Mike squeezes her hand that bit harder. “That girl, um-- Robin is in there with him now. She made him feel better.”

Read: Nancy couldn’t. 

As far as Mike can tell, Max was the only one who had succeeded in doing that so far. But due to the fact that she is half Steve’s size, she’s pretty ineffective at keeping him still. Hopper would have him steady, no problem. Would manhandle Steve into a state of compliance without doing him much harm at all. But the Chief has left them, through no fault of his own, and it is up to Robin now. She’d managed Steve quite well over the beginning of summer, but this? _This_ is different. 

Different in a way that none of them really know how to handle. Because parasitic monsters with a dozen rows of teeth that are the stuff of a campaign gone terribly wrong can be dealt with in such wild and dangerous ways that pay no mind to average human actions. But Russians that drug and torture teenage boys (he’s not quite certain of what age Steve is, honestly) for information that they only _half_ have in the first place is a tad beyond what they’re accustomed to. 

_Well, no,_ Mike corrects himself. They’re used to Steve approaching their interdimensional problems with a bruised brain and a broken nose, but _drugs?_ That’s a whole other wheelhouse that none of them can really get a handle on. Maybe Max, who’s from California, where everything is easy breezy and people do drugs in public like it’s no big deal (at least that’s what the TV says when dad has command over the channels and Nancy Reagan is making some kind of announcement). But this is Hawkins where, quite honestly, Mike didn’t know such things existed. 

He knows Nancy likes to believe that she’s never been quite that naive, but he can see how it’s shaken her. How this feels like a problem that can’t be fixed with a glock from the glove compartment and some bear traps. That this is a situation with an outcome that she has no control over. One she has to trust Owens with. Maybe she should talk to Jonathan about that. 

“Well Robin’s been putting him in his place all summer. She’ll have no trouble dealing with King Steve.”

When Mike ushers her over to where Jonathan is sprawled, clearly frustrated while prone to lay on his stomach, Nancy’s rigid posture visibly loosens into something that could soon resemble relaxed. But as he makes his way back over to El, where he and Max have set up sentry at her bedside, he looks back and sees his sister worry her lip between her teeth with such a severity that it should be breaking skin. 

Perhaps things are a tad worse than they originally thought.

…

One of Max’s braids has come undone in the blue and red haze of the night, and her fingers can’t help but tangle up in the dry split ends that have been left to frizz and unwind in crunchy waves. 

Billy used to get at her for that -- for not caring about it as much as he did. Would swat her hands away from all of his hair products when she _tried_ to care, tried to escape from her mother’s pink and frilly grasp and look like someone Lucas might want to kiss at the Snow Ball. 

She tried mousses and gel and spray, and Billy got so mad about the whole thing -- what Susan would _say_ , what Neil would _do_ \-- that he held her head under the faucet for fifteen minutes in an attempt to wash all the product out. 

He’d probably tug the other braid out now, just to spite her. She thinks maybe Steve tried to plait it back together outside the mall. Until his hands stopped working.

“His hands… did something happen to them?” The words slip out before it can really dawn on Max that they’ve put the conversation to rest. That Nancy is sat on Jonathan’s bed and Mike has put her there mostly to wipe that look off her face. 

She’ll feel guilty about it later. 

“At the mall, I-- well I think I hurt him. I don’t know.” El looks up at her as she speaks with the kind of understanding in her eyes that Max can’t really put into words. She can’t wait until they’re all out of here and the two of them can curl up in bed like one eternal sleepover and forget anything bad ever happened to either of them. “I don’t really remember.”

Mike answers as though the question was intended for their little bubble in El’s corner and not the room at large. And Max finds it hard to believe that he’ll ever have something reassuring to say to her. 

“You scratched the shit out of his arms.” _Mike!_ A warning from Nancy, but he carries on regardless. 

“And you kicked a lot when they were, uh, taking Billy away. Got me and Lucas a couple times too.” Max would like to say sorry, would like to maybe thank them for trying to help. Party loyalty and all. Better attempts at being better boyfriends. At understanding that Billy wasn’t always the best, but she’d lived with him for more of her life than not. That he wasn’t her brother by any means, but he was the only person who knew the worst of what it was like to live in that house on Old Cherry.

“I didn’t mean to, I- ”

“Hey, don’t apologise.” Erica had long shoved Lucas off, giving him space to approach Max. Albeit with hesitance. “Besides, you didn’t hurt him. Steve was captain of the basketball team, he can handle a tackle.”

Nancy laughs a little at that, a fragile thing that sputters and has Jonathan squeezing her shoulder like Lucas is squeezing Max’s. 

“I think he was hallucinating earlier. Still is, maybe.” Nancy shrugs, Jonathan’s hand falls by the wayside. “Not like an episode, but… something else. He probably didn’t even know what he was doing, Max.”

Which can’t be right, no. Because Steve had held her through the whole thing. He was the calm one, he’d carried her out of the mall. Brushed her hair back and told her to breathe in time with him -- even though it sounded funny and she couldn’t quite keep track. 

The last time someone had done that for Max was California. When she had to say goodbye to her dad. Steve knew what he was doing; he had to. 

Before she can retort and allow the anger that comes with hurting and being a member of the Mayfield-Hargrove household to spill out all over the rubbery floors, Robin ducks out from behind the curtain. Like it’s a show in a theatre and they’re all taking turns with their monologues. 

Dustin gets his hands on her before anyone else can. Not like she’s just about to impart her new information on the room as a whole. He’s a tad more frantic than Max had thought, but her focus had been on El then, as a way to distract from her own confusing thoughts and feelings. And then on Steve, because his focus had been on her before he totally lost it. 

“What’s happening? Is he okay? Does he want to see me?” It’s all lost in that rapid pattern of Dustin’s speech, not slow like how he speaks to Steve -- or Mike when he’s trying to make a point -- and Ms Byers, from where she’s sat up in her cot now is squinting like she doesn’t quite understand.

“Hey, chill out, Roast Beef.” _What?_ “Owens in there?” Robin jerks a thumb back towards the slight parting in the curtain, hip cocking out to the side. “That dude knows what he’s doing.”

“ _Does_ he?” Nancy counters, not standing yet, but straightening her posture into a ramrod state. “Because last I saw Steve was crying because he thought I let the Russians _poison_ Dustin. He thinks all of these people,” she throws her arms wide to the room as a whole, “are Soviet _spies_ planning to _torture_ us.”

“Well Soviet spies _did_ torture him, Wheeler, so I can see why he might think that.” The silence that follows is far more uncomfortable than the ones prior. But Robin is unflinching, holds Nancy’s gaze with a burning glare as she carries on, arms crossing over her chest; Max thinks it’s mostly to stop the shaking. 

“ _Anyways,_ Owens gave dingus a little something to calm him down. He’s all woozy. Gonna bring him over to radiology for a head scan. And you, Byers, get to accompany him.”

“Me?” Will balks. Like he’s not Steve’s favourite aside from El purely for being the most agreeable person in the group. Steve says he doesn’t do favouritism, because it’s _poor form_ or something. Max knows full well that she and the other boys argue far too much to be high in the ranks.

“No, Will. You chill out here with your mom, yeah? Owens said Jonathan needs x-rays or something. Your back, huh?”

Jonathan nods, quietly rising in his cot with the help of Nancy. 

“Not so fast there, Jonny.” And it’s the doctor again, the one who’s in charge. “You sit tight and we’re going to wheel you down on the gurney. No use doing more damage to your back when we don’t quite know what we’re dealing with.” 

It appears they have the same idea about Steve, because two nurses open the curtains that were previously concealing him and wheel him through the centre of the makeshift ward. 

It’s embarrassing, a little raw maybe, how they all stop to stare at him. Max’s breath catches in her throat at the sight of Steve, strapped to the gurney like that. There’s blood on the pillow where he must have been rolling his head around and they’ve replaced his Scoops Ahoy uniform with a hospital gown. Another IV port has been placed in the crook of his elbow and one of the nurses is struggling to wheel the pole with the baggie of fluid on top alongside the gurney.

Max would like to offer some help, to go down there with Steve and make sure he’s okay, but she knows from stuff with Billy back in California that they don’t like having kids in the radiology department if they can help it. 

Steve gasps a shallow breath that rattles, echoes out into the utter silence of the ward. It sounds like something has been caught and trapped inside his chest, and it heaves --- they can all see it doing so more clearly now, without the weird lapels and nametag to distract. 

“... my outfit.” And his voice is even worse now, like he doesn’t have enough air in his chest to get the words out. Max’s heart breaks a little at the sound of it. “Think ‘m a spy in a sailor’s uniform?”

Initially, it sounds like he’s asking them. Like he wants them to look at him in his chaotic, stripped down state. Max makes to turn away, because she can’t just stand and watch this happen anymore. But before she does, she sees Robin out of the corner of her eye as she intercepts Dusin and the reply to Steve that was just about to leave his mouth with a subtle nod. 

Steve casts his eyes around, wildly, eyes glazed over and cloudy. He looks like Billy did before the sedative she shot in his neck finally knocked him out. His knees, surprisingly bony, jerk up and his arms stretch out like the mattress is too small for him; and when he smiles lazily in the direction of herself, Mike, and El, Max is reminded of a time back in June when he’d sprawled out on a sun lounger like a cat and let them all cool off in his parents’ pool. 

She moves to squeeze his one loose hand, to see if the bones are really there and Nancy was right about the drugs, but El catches her wrist softly before she can move any further, summoning her back to the cot with a slight shake of the head. 

As he’s wheeled from the room, Steve begins muttering to himself again, Jonathan now tight on his tail. 

“ _Scoops_ … work for Scoops Ahoy, I-- ”

And Max can’t help but wonder if Steve thinks they left him behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in which i can't remember the name of the road max and billy live on because i feel like the show keeps changing it :')
> 
> thank you so much for all the comments on the previous chapters. you're all so lovely, i- <3 pls let me know what you think if you have the time, and thank you for reading!


	5. trying to fit beneath the skin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for negative and self-deprecating thoughts regarding brain injuries

It’s strange to be the subject of Dr Owens’ focus when, for so long, it had been Will. Jonathan’s unused to the scrutiny of it all, as, before his whole life turned into a poorly-written horror movie, the only people to pay attention to him were schoolyard bullies, a particular brand of them, really. Not jocks, who treated him with a mocking fondness because he took their team photographs, but the  _ King Steve’s _ of the world. 

He thinks of Nancy, and how it feels that maybe she was the only person to ever see  _ just  _ him. And like him for all the things she saw inside. Not merely the brother of Zombie Boy or deadbeat Lonnie Byers’ freak of a son. Just  _ Jonathan. _

But right now he is not Will’s brother, or Joyce’s son (and never his father’s), he is a patient with a back injury. He’s Jonny Boy, apparently. 

Even that is too much to handle, it seems. Jonathan can’t cope with the heavy gaze or the pure and unfiltered attention, so he coughs low, down towards his chest and when he lifts his eyes they land on the pane of glass between Jonathan, and Owens, the technicians in this small room and Steve; who is on the other side. Who is being sucked into a cylindrical chamber with a weird mesh mask holding him in place that will no doubt give him hat hair. 

Through the glass, Steve’s fingers lift in a jerky wave towards him. The nurses swat it back down, fix him to the panel of the machine. Jonathan thinks this is something that should be watched. That this is something important. When no one speaks for a few moments and he can still feel Owens’ assessing him from his left, Jonathan is the one who finally breaks the silence. 

“Steve’s had three concussions -- that I know of.” 

He doesn't know if that time behind the movie theatre caused one. Tells Owen as much. But he remembers as kids when Steve fell out of a tree after reaching the very top and earning his royal title. When he tried to do a somersault off the roof at Hawkins public pool and split his head open on the tile, before landing the perfect cannonball. And he remembers Halloween, after saving Will and closing the gate and Billy Hargrove, when Steve had a weird episode in the middle of their living room floor and Hopper wouldn't let any of them touch him until he stopped shaking. 

He says _ it was fine, though, after that. Could that happen every time he gets a concussion? _

Owens shakes his head, says  _ they're not looking for a concussion. Or drugs. These machines don't find those things. But not to worry.  _

Jonathan sees Steve's leg jerk from where it sticks out of the cylindrical machine and Owens presses on a button and speaks into the microphone, voice a rhythmic rumble, lacking the crafted charisma of earlier.

“It’s alright, Steve. You keep nice and still for me now, okay? It’ll be over before you know it.”

And Jonathan would like to cry, really. He doesn't know what to do. The Chief always knows. The Chief always asks the right questions that they should have asked Steve the second they saw the state of his face. He remembers Hop telling him to check Steve's ears last Halloween, for bleeding, for clear fluid. 

_ Check his pupils. Did he vomit? _ And sure Jonathan was tired then, but he is fit to deflate with the feeling of absolute  _ hopelessness  _ that overpowers him now. He didn’t know what to do to fix it then, and he certainly doesn’t know now. He doesn’t even know if Steve would like him to help or hold his hand or hug him. He’s not Nancy. Or Robin. Or Max. Or his mom. Even Dustin would do a better job at this. But Jonathan just doesn’t know how to  _ be  _ with Steve.

Maybe it’s the worry of what will happen after this moment. Of not being able to unknow whatever results may come from these scans. But it has him asking Owens if he can talk into the microphone for a moment. 

He moves to wipe his eyes and his back hurts so bad that his vision goes black for a second. His back  _ hurts  _ and mom is  _ shattered  _ and for  _ once  _ Will is okay, but Hopper is  _ gone _ and now they have _ no one. _ He closes his eyes and tries to pretend this is all over. 

Tells Steve, voice a mere whisper:

“You’re not there, Steve. You’re here with me.”

Then a nurse calls his name and it's his turn. He's wheeled into another room and has to leave the version of Steve he once knew behind.

…

This is a tunnel that he’s in. It’s different from before. Sterile. Like Russian tunnels. And he’s walking and walking and it never ends, really. It hasn’t since last November.

But it’s fine because even though he’s scared and the noise the machine makes is loud and whooshing like when he and the others were stuck in the elevator, Steve can’t move. He can’t move because his limbs feel like jelly. Not in the same bad way as before, but in a nice way. Loose and easy and too heavy for lifting. Because the Doc gave him benzos and they _ always  _ make Steve feel better. 

It’s not like he has a prescription or anything. His mom does, though. She has doctors in LA and Manhattan and Chicago writing her up tonnes of different scripts for the same damn thing. So there’s a surplus. And sometimes these pills, they make the Upside Down go away. Maybe they can make the Russians go away too. 

So, it calms him to think this way. Owens put the drug in his IV port and told Steve all about it. Explained the process. Listed off the effects he  _ should  _ have been feeling  _ as  _ he was feeling them. And then,  _ then  _ he said that Jonathan would be coming with them to Radiology. Which was just, well, the  _ best. _ Because Jonathan never lets anyone get hurt. Not if he can help it.

Steve waves at him through the big window and a man slaps his hand down. He doesn’t think much on who the man is, only that the weird mesh thing on his head is crushing his hair. And Jonathan doesn’t wave back. Or maybe he does, but Steve can’t see because he’s in the tunnel now. The snow white tunnel with its whirring noise and the rest of the world working away at his feet. In another room. Having left him to be by himself. 

No kids; in their makeshift masks and goggles, with their little survival kits. No Robin by his side, with Erica and her helmet and  _ My Little Pony _ backpack, giving Dustin shit for merely existing. 

No mom and dad-- _ never _ mom and dad, because they don’t come home when he calls anymore; stopped doing that the moment he started high school. 

Hopper, though. He should be  _ here, _ right? 

Man always likes to keep on top of things, keep everyone where he can see them. Last year when Billy split Steve’s face open all over Ms Byers’ floor, Hop wouldn’t even let him  _ sleep. _ Steve wanted to go home and Hop wouldn’t hear anything about it -- only way he got out of that house and out of the way so  _ Will  _ could be taken care of was by convincing the Chief that his mom was  _ actually  _ home this time. _ Believe it or not.  _ Good thing he’d taken to leaving all the lights on since Barb got eaten by a monster in his pool. 

The nurse said that Steve should try to stay calm during this procedure. Steve doesn’t like her or trust her an inch, but the Doc is there behind the glass and Jonathan is there too. He can hardly see them anymore, but he knows that Jonathan didn’t look scared when they got wheeled down here. And Steve can always tell when Jonathan is scared. It’s like his sixth sense. 

But Steve is now a little scared, whether he has grounds to be or not. And he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to tell anyone that. Not when the nurse told him to stay still and think happy thoughts. Not when Jonathan is hunched over in pain and separated from him by a panel of glass. Not when Doctor Owens has been so calming this entire time that Steve’s beginning to wonder if the guy is a little complacent. 

Hopper should be here. Hopper would call Owens out for this indifference and yank Steve out of this god-awful machine that’s so small and tight, he’s finding it a little hard to catch his breath. 

This is not supposed to happen. The pills he takes from mom’s bathroom cabinet don’t allow him to feel like this, they don’t let their air leave his lungs in tiny gasps, choked things that burn on the way up. He’s trying to stay still like the nurse said and get this over with so he can get to the kids and Ms Byers and figure out what the  _ hell  _ is going on with Hopper. But it’s hard, being alone again. 

He chances at shutting his eyes, even though the Doc said something about an orbital fracture and his face just hurts  _ so  _ much. Tries to let the void of black give way to pulses of colour that greet him each time he tries to sleep. But it’s nothing like that, it’s  _ not.  _ It’s the blue, sterile hue, a dark room, his back to the wall and his wrists tied by the base of his spine. It’s hot breath getting too close to his face and laughing at Steve like hurting him is fun, like it’s something to  _ relish  _ in. 

Steve knew -- he  _ knows  _ \-- that he’s easy to hurt. Knows that he’s pretty easy to knock over and even easier to hold down. With words, with fists -- it doesn’t matter. Tommy was right about him and his inability to win a fight; it’s half the reason he kept the other boy around. Protection, some weird security blanket of childhood that he was terrified to crawl out from under for fear of realising what kind of person he might become -- a  _ better  _ person, at that. 

Steve doesn’t know why people find it easy, they just do. A few hits and he’s out. The other kids at school used to joke that he still had a soft spot on his skull, under all that hair, and grew it out as padding. He tries to fight and does his best to be big and strong and protect people like Hopper, fight for the people he loves like Jonathan, or fight _ at all  _ like Billy. Maybe he doesn’t  _ want _ it enough, maybe he doesn’t  _ like  _ to hurt. 

But no, that’s not fair -- it’s not as if he really believes any of the people who beat him up enjoyed hurting him (though he could never really tell with Billy, who struggled to even meet his eye for the entire second semester of senior year). It’s not fair to think that just because this Russian guy -- Ozerov -- smiled so big and bright as he watched Steve get hurt, gave him a damn  _ nickname, _ that everyone else liked it too. That he at all deserved it. 

He did, before, with Jonathan and all those things Steve said about the Byers as a family. He might have with Billy, for lying, for not putting up enough of a fight to protect the kids. But this time? Steve couldn’t even fight his own corner. Couldn’t lift his arms or use his fists because Ozerov took his hands away from him; took his power away, his  _ choice  _ to fight back. And maybe he deserved to suffer for his last few encounters, deserved the migraines and the nausea for the things he said. This time, though, feels like the worst of all. Like he won’t quite bounce back from it. 

And he doesn’t  _ want  _ to be in this big machine, with no Hopper and nothing but white, hot light at the end of the tunnel, because a large part of Steve would rather not know why he feels this way. 

He has no desire to ponder on why his leg kicks up of its own accord, a jerk he didn’t even really feel, but must have, because it’s not like he’s willing to open his eyes. Some people might call it an out of body experience, like someone is pulling the strings attached to his extremities and he’s lost control. 

Steve wishes.

Wishes he could be anywhere but his own body. Trapped in tremors and fireworks on his face that feel hot and burn him any time he tries to move. Stuck with the face of Ozerov tattooed on the inside of his eyelids, the face of Billy, the faceless Demogorgon that’s like a flower petal with  _ teeth, teeth, teeth.  _

It’s not his fault that he moves. But Owens scolds him for it anyway. Steve would like to argue now, respond to him and say that things don’t feel okay like they did a few minutes ago, and maybe he needs more Klonopin, but he was told to keep still and maybe something bad will happen to him if he does not. 

So he lays there and breathes, tries to keep it cool and get this over with so he can make sure everyone is okay. It’s hard to do, so he attempts holding his breath instead. A big, hiccuping gulp of air sucked into his lungs where he holds it tight, keeps it there until this is all over. Or until he passes out. 

Vision not black, but vivid with the colour of his own blood spurting from a busted lip, a busted eye, a nose broken three times over. The red of Starcourt at night, of Max’s hair, of the bruise on the rise of her cheekbone. Sailor blue and the blue machine hum of the Russian bunker. The green liquid in the boxes and Nancy’s purple dress. The beads of Erica’s bracelet, the pastels of Hopper’s ugly shirt, the  _ blue, red, green, yellow _ flash of the Byers Christmas lights and a monster ripping through the wall. 

_ “You’re not there, Steve. You’re here with me.” _

It’s a whisper of a thing, a sound from the sky that blankets him in the closest thing to a reality that he can fathom. An angel, the cartoonish guardian kind maybe, but no. That’s Jonathan. It is him, Steve would know his voice anywhere. 

So rarely through the day time, but often at night, that voice visits him, accompanied by others. A quiet rebuttal at the base of his brain, a voice that begs for reason and care and sounds so achingly like that of Joyce Byers that it makes Steve cry. A voice that rides in tandem with Nancy’s, as they finish each others' sentences and love in synchronisation. A gentle thing that would never permit hurt, at least not with such ease. Jonathan sounds calm, so Steve should feel calm. He is safe here, with Jonathan. 

They are not  _ there,  _ with monsters and bad men and tunnels that open up beneath your feet and swallow you whole, but in a room, where Doctor Owens has put him in a machine to see what’s going on inside his brain; to see why it is that Steve is suddenly so afraid without a single ounce of reprieve. 

His eyes open and their sockets burn with the white light. Steve stays still for as long as his body permits. He does his absolute best to get this over with because he still doesn’t feel okay and some actual sleep is long overdue. 

Head a little heavier than before, he is extracted from the machine. Limbs loose as he tries to sit, but is instead lifted from the surface of the white tunnel and back onto his gurney. Rails up, the only cuffs they fasten are the ones around his ankles, but his leg is kicking without him even wanting it to again, so the restraints pull tight at his skin and it hurts. 

The nurses tell him that if he promises not to rub his eyes, his hands can stay free -- that if he promises not to scratch or hit, there won’t be a problem. Steve doesn’t want to think too hard on why they say that. 

When they wheel him from the room, Jonathan is nowhere to be seen. It’s not that Steve is worried or anything, because the guy needs to get seen to just like Steve did, but being alone with these people is not something that he wants to spend much time doing. They seem like normal nurses and doctors, sure, but they  _ always  _ do. 

“Where we goin’?” Steve asks, twisting around in the gurney when they don’t make the turn back to where he heard the others’ voices. 

“To your room.” A voice from the vague surround of figures says. It’s not Owens, but it’s not entirely unfriendly either. “We can’t treat you on that ward with all the kids around.”

Yes, this means he will be alone and it is a fact that terrifies him, but control of his own body and mind has been lost to the whims of whatever the Russians knocked into his brain when they were trying to get information regarding him and Robin. It’s not that he wants to be by himself or anything, but the kids can’t see more of that. Not when he’s like this, when none of them know if he’s his old self or if he’s this new Steve who is missing a few parts and they will have to learn to love all over again.

His ears ring and the swinging doors clatter open with the impact Steve holds tight to the railings like he’s about to take the hundred foot plunge off the peak of a rollercoaster. Something in his gut goes whoosh, and though there can’t possibly be anything remaining in his system, he spits bile up into his lap and onto his new and clean gown. He’s embarrassed, though it’s not like anyone he will actually remember saw this time. He’s surrounded on all sides by those nurses, like he’s someone special; like they don’t want him to be  _ seen.  _

It’s enough to frighten him properly, without chance of it only being paranoia this time. 

They wheel him into the room -- small, square, and clean with no windows -- and ease him onto the made up bed that has crisp pillows and a woolly looking blanket. A pretty nurse peels him out of his gown and puts on a fresh one, tells him he has lovely, soft hair and she’ll be by to wash it later. 

Another dabs at the cuts on his face, the welts left by rings that tore chunks from his flesh. His eye is cleaned and it hurts like it might explode and his entire face will be swallowed up by a hole. His nose is set and they talk about wiring his jaw before it’s considered unnecessary. Steve is glad. Too much has been taken from him only to lose his voice too. 

When breathing isn’t so easy and the nurses establish that panic is not the only cause, they strap a rubber mask to his face. It’s steamy and he sounds like Darth Vader when he breathes in and out. He thinks the kids would like that. That it might even make them smile. He wants to see them  _ now  _ so he can show it off, but when he asks the old nurse with the big eyes she tell him  _ no, _ scolding him like he’s asked a dumb question in class. 

He asks her  _ why,  _ why can’t he see them now? He’s okay, he’s cleaned up and breathing right and he’s not tripping out anymore because the drugs are  _ working  _ and Steve isn’t planning on scarring them all even more. He only wants to check on Max because her brother is dead and her step-dad’s an asshole and Steve is certain that the parents will all be called before he’s even given a chance to get out of this bed. 

He wants to say sorry to Robin for making her arm bleed. And to ask her for her address or number or  _ anything  _ because a small part of him is afraid that while Russians were an acceptable evil, maybe the Mindflayer and the Upside Down and Billy Hargrove from her AP Lit class being penetrated by blackened tentacles and bleeding inky blood all over the mall floor is a little too much. 

But the nurses come and they go. And Steve is reminded of his own parents. He does his best not to dwell too much on that as the machines beep and his mask leaves his mouth and nose wet with condensation. He presses a hand to the sharpening ache in his ribs and regulates his breathing like this is his last game of the season. 

His eyes do not squeeze shut, but they flutter softly into a midway state of sleep and consciousness. The hum of the heart monitor and the hiss of his mask, the dull ringing in his ear that hasn’t stopped and will never stop. The real thing that the Russians took from him; Doc Owens comes in to tell him as much a few hours later.

Though time is a thing he cannot currently wrap his mind around, so it may have only been a few minutes. 

“So, you understand what I’m saying, don’t you, son?” Steve looks at Owens’ mouth when he speaks, because the machines are loud and his eyes are a watery kind of hazel that Steve finds hard to look at. Like his fathers, maybe, but softer. 

He can’t respond, not with the mask on, so he nods. Thinks that maybe he ought to be a little more upset about it, as Owens looks like he was expecting some kind of reaction. But what’s there to be upset about now? Everything? His brain has sustained damage. _Trauma_ is what Owens calls it. 

Trauma like the thing that’s haunted all of them since this monster business began back in ‘83, only Steve’s is a physical thing that’s changed the way his brain works because he’s easy to knock down, knock out, knock  _ dead.  _ Some  _ king. _

And he wishes that he could say he doesn’t feel different, like when he turned eighteen and Dustin was afraid he’d want to get a tattoo and run away to work in a diner on Route 66, but he felt the like the same old Steve who got benched from the basketball team and couldn’t get into college. 

He  _ does  _ feel different and so very  _ wrong, _ like another Steve who is  _ less.  _ Less than the one before. Less than the one who got rejected from every college he applied to and his parents couldn’t stand to look at. The feeling of being less than  _ that  _ makes him forget to breathe. 

Doctor Owens notices and lifts the mask from his face, twists something to close the valve and sits back in his seat to regard Steve evenly. Like this is a normal conversation to have and Owens is his regular doctor. 

“It’s not a permanent diagnosis, Steve.” He sighs, legs spread apart on the stool with wheels; on Steve’s level. “The brain is a complicated organ. Things can be relearned. Your motor function requires a little fine tuning, but outwardly, everything seems fine.”

The pleased part of Steve feels as though it belongs to his father. Like,  _ whew, we’re out of the woods. No one will know what happened here. No one will know you’re different, that your insides are a little crooked and mismatched like the wrong pieces of a jigsaw puzzle forced to be together.  _

He attempts to halt that line of thinking, but it’s a perpetual inner monologue that he’s had for as long as he can remember.

“You’re a sportsman, right Steve? Let me guess: baseball, basketball… bet you even run track.” Steve hasn’t run track since middle school, but he nods regardless. 

“Well, your brain needs to exercise itself, try and regain all the functions it once had -- like you’ve been out for a few seasons and you’re trying to prep for the league.” He pauses then, like the following words ought to be carefully considered -- not blunt, but not entirely delicate either.

“Your ear, now that’s another story altogether. We ran the tests -- the tuning forks and the scans, even had a little root around in there, if you can recall -- and there isn’t much to it, Steve. It’s gone.” Owens’ hands do the talking again, fingers splaying outwards from the palms of his hands like fireworks. “Kaput!”

“The ringing should stop in time, once your body absorbs all that shock and you get some rest, and it’s important to remember that you’re a pretty lucky guy.”

A desperate, little “How?” crawls up Steve’s throat and leaps off his tongue, but it’s hard to be embarrassed by it, given the fact that Owens has seen him whimper and cry and puke all over his sailor uniform.

“Your other ear works just fine, and judging by what your friend Jonathan tells me, you healed up quite nicely last time around. I see no reason why your face should scar too badly this time, especially since Betty got you all stitched up.” Steve doesn’t even remember getting stitches; maybe it was the drugs or the exhaustion, or maybe everything hurt too much anyway to feel it. 

“And that nose!” Owens celebrates, marvelling at the work of his employees. “Broken how many times now, three? And still, straight as an arrow.”

Steve twists the corners of the woollen blanket between his fingers and thinks of how his hands are his own now. How the skin is a little scabbed and the nail bed of his middle finger aches a little from the pull, how bone peeks through the flesh of his knuckles when he squeezes too hard; which he does, because he can. 

He mouths at words that feel gummy in his mouth, that don’t want to come out for fear of what can’t be unsaid. Stupidly, he’s afraid he won’t be able to hear his own voice, even though he did only a moment ago, even though he can hear himself whimper as the bed sheets twist. 

“Look, Steve-O, if there’s any silver lining to the last few years, it’s this: those maggots in there on my ward are shrill and very demanding and, above all, they  _ miss  _ you. I’ve already heard the brunt of it, I think, but there’s probably more where that came from once they actually lay their eyes on you.” He keeps going, like this is meant to make Steve feel any better, but he’s willing to afford the Doc the benefit of the doubt given the circumstances.

“My point being: they’re loud and incessant and annoying, but it seems to me they’re the only family you’ve got. Not all of us are fortunate enough to be able to crank the volume down.”

The world has knocked its volume by about fifty percent and Steve’s chest stutters painfully like he’s fit to cry, but he sits there with his woolly blankets and his machines and hands that are entirely his own, allows his eyes to latch directly onto Owens’, and laughs anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for taking the time to read this -- your comments have all been so lovely and mean the world! should round things up in a few chapters or so. hope you're all keeping well x


End file.
